In this paper we study ruled surfaces which appear as an exceptional
surface in a succession of blowing-ups. In particular we prove
that the $e$-invariant of such a ruled exceptional surface $E$ is
strictly positive whenever its intersection with the other
exceptional surfaces does not contain a fiber (of $E$). This fact
immediately enables us to resolve an open problem concerning an
intersection configuration on such a ruled exceptional surface
consisting of three nonintersecting sections. In the second part
of the paper we apply the non-vanishing of $e$ to the study of the
poles of the well-known topological, Hodge and motivic zeta
functions.

Let $X$ be a nonsingular algebraic variety in characteristic zero. To
an effective divisor on $X$ Kontsevich has associated a certain
motivic integral, living in a completion of the Grothendieck ring of
algebraic varieties. He used this invariant to show that birational
(smooth, projective) Calabi-Yau varieties have the same Hodge
numbers. Then Denef and Loeser introduced the invariant {\it motivic
(Igusa) zeta function}, associated to a regular function on $X$, which
specializes to both the classical $p$-adic Igusa zeta function and the
topological zeta function, and also to Kontsevich's invariant.
This paper treats a generalization to singular varieties. Batyrev
already considered such a `Kontsevich invariant' for log terminal
varieties (on the level of Hodge polynomials of varieties instead of
in the Grothendieck ring), and previously we introduced a motivic zeta
function on normal surface germs. Here on any $\bbQ$-Gorenstein
variety $X$ we associate a motivic zeta function and a `Kontsevich
invariant' to effective $\bbQ$-Cartier divisors on $X$ whose support
contains the singular locus of~$X$.